While youngsters are at lower risk of severe illness or death than older people, more than 5 million children in the U.S. have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began and at least 460 have died, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Data about booster shots for those who had received the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines could be a few weeks away from being reviewed, days after an FDA panel approved booster shots for a limited population of those who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Over several hours of discussion on Friday, members of the Food and Drug Administration panel of outside experts voiced frustration that Pfizer had provided little data on the safety of extra doses.
The drugmaker’s COVID-19 treatment is back on the market after a two-month suspension, but the question is whether Lilly can grab market share from now-dominant Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Scientists inside and outside the government have been divided in recent days over the need for boosters and who should get them.
The Indiana State Department of Health has reported 222 new deaths from COVID-19 over the past four days, an average of 55.5 per day.
The state’s largest hospital system said the employees had been suspended for two weeks without pay and would have been eligible to return to work if they had attested to partial or full vaccination.
The assignment is sure to test an understaffed agency that has struggled to defend its authority in court. And the legal challenges to Biden’s vaccine mandate will be unrelenting.
The seven-day moving average of new deaths rose from 26 to 27 per day, the state health department said.
Influential government advisers will debate Friday if there’s enough proof that a booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective—the first step toward deciding which Americans need one and when.
Pfizer said that data from the United States and Israel suggest that the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine wanes over time, and that a booster dose was safe and effective at warding off the virus and new variants.
The White House meeting comes less than a week after Biden announced that the Labor Department is working to require businesses with 100 or more employees to order those workers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, or show a negative test result at least weekly.
More than 3.18 million Hoosiers had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of Wednesday, up by 5,436 from the previous day.
Eli Lilly’s therapy has been shown to be highly effective against the delta variant, which is now the dominant strain of the coronavirus in the United States.
Indiana school districts grappling with a possible loss of funding for quarantining students could get relief under newly proposed legislation.
More than a third (33.6%) of Indiana’s intensive care unit beds are occupied by COVID patients.
After accounting for all the federal relief payments, the so-called supplemental poverty measure declined to 9.1% in 2020—the lowest on record and a significant decline from 11.8% in 2019.
Leaders of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are warning that the pandemic could set back global progress on education, public health and gender equality for years.
The Indianapolis City-County Council on Monday unanimously approved about $467 million in spending for pandemic recovery initiatives, rental assistance, a range of new public buildings and several greenway projects, most of it funded with federal coronavirus relief dollars.
More than 3.16 million Hoosiers had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of Monday, up by 16,308 over the weekend.
